This is a completely unscheduled post that I wrote earlier today on the train, returning from Lille. It was our first proper visit to the city – Eurostar stops don’t count – and it was ridiculously convenient, taking about half an hour from Brussels. Lille is a charming place, good for a walk in the Flemish-influenced old town or for a spot of French shopping. I liked all that, but my favourite bit was LaM, the museum for modern, contemporary and outsider art.

Lille has several great museums, but the most celebrated one – the museum of fine art – is closed on Tuesdays, as is the natural history museum, our daughter’s first pick. So we took an Uber ride a bit out of the town to go to LaM, me mostly enticed by their Modiglianis that I in the end didn’t see (not sure if they were on loan or I just missed the right room).

Even without the blasted Modiglianis, it’s a decent museum – it has a fine selection of Braques, a smattering of Picasso, a couple of Miros and other things you’d remember from your art history class. In the surrounding park, there are some impressive sculptures. It was the outsider part that got me, however: there are better Picassos to be seen elsewhere, but I’d never come across such a serious presentation of art brut, as it’s called in the original French.

I’ve never really been drawn to this marginal territory in art – produced by people outside “official culture”, from the mentally ill to those who are simply self-taught and not part of the system. That’s probably because art brut is often quite naive, surreal or rough, things I usually don’t gravitate towards. And also because I cannot even keep up with the official art, thank you very much.

So it came as a surprise how much I enjoyed the exposition in Lille. I liked the crazy big canvases of Augustin Lesage, the French coal miner who began painting his mandala meets kaleidoscope meets Taj Mahal meets Moroccan tiles meets all religions ever pictures with some help from spirits. I was moved by Madge Gill’s women she created in mediumistic frenzy. I pondered André Robillard’s intricate guns that he makes out of salvaged objects. I admired the totem-like fence sculptures Theo Wiesen carved in his little Belgian village. Most of all, I enjoyed he meticulous pieces by ACM that looked to me like science fiction cityscapes from a very good and bleak Japanese movie.

It always seems somewhat pathetic or at least lazy to praise something – a book, a song, a painting – because “it made me think”. No shit, Sherlock. But it’s true that to me, no essay or lecture or refined conversation has ever made the point about the arbitrariness of what we decide is art as strongly as that collection in Lille.

*I WAS BEING IRONIC.